Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Grassroots Organizations in Favor of Massive Oil Pipeline

The Keystone XL is a massive pipeline project that, if approved, will run from Canadian tar sands mining sites to oil refineries in Texas. Treehuggers are whining about the “environmental impact” or something or other.

In response, thousands of everyday Real Americans have erupted into spontaneous grassroots activism on behalf of oil company profits. Nebraska Energy Forum and Partnership to Fuel America are just two of these grassroots organizations.

With a little help from the oil industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, respectively, these two groups of just-plain-folks hardworking Americans will make sure the Keystone XL pipeline doesn’t get derailed by a bunch of socialist bureaucrats.

The Keystone XL would go through Nebraska and jeopardize the state’s largest aquifer. Nebraska’s Republican governor, both senators and a Republican representative are all opposed to this pipeline and are urging the Obama Administration to halt the project.

Uh oh — looks like Big Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have their work cut out for them. They might need to create a few more of those grassroots organizations and start cranking out a lot more spontaneous demonstrations.

**************************************

Q. What’s the difference between Mississippi in the 1950s and Wisconsin in 2011?

A. Sixty years; 919 miles.

Wisconsin’s new Son of Jim Crow voting law is getting more blatant all the time. It wasn’t enough to require everyone to show a photo ID before they can vote. They also closed a bunch of DMV offices — which is where you have to go to get the required photo ID — that happened to be located in low income neighborhoods.

Now they’re trying to extort money out of the citizens who go to the DMV to get their (supposedly free) photo ID card. Wisconsin DMV officials have received a memo from Steve Krieser, executive secretary of the Department of Transportation:

“While you should certainly help customers who come in asking for a free ID to check the appropriate box, you should refrain from offering the free version to customers who do not ask for it.”

7 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Wait a minute!

We need this Pipeline, it will not only bring a lot of jobs but supply all of our future energy needs so that we no longer are dependent on OPEC .... Oh I'm sorry I thought this was 1970 and we were talking about the Alaska Pipeline

Hey now, us brown people don't need to vote, because we typically vote for dems according to the fright wing. Supposedly we are all of the same mind when it comes to issues. Oh and it's not a poll tax, it's a fee big difference you know. If you weren't a DFH you would know these things :)

As far as the pipeline, we could always just do what crazy eyes said in the debate tonight, drill in the Everglades, they are just sitting there doing nothing anyway so it's time for them to pay us back for taking up space. That was me channeling one L crazy eyes right there. I have a future in teabagging circles, coz the first step is learning the language.

Erik: We'll never create jobs or be free until we drill for oil in the Everglades and rip open Yellowstone Park so we can frack it for every ounce of natural gas under there.

Lincoln is turning in his grave.

Jess: That's right, damn the Everglades and every other patch of wilderness. All that unused land is just sitting there, doing nothing, just waiting, begging, to be drilled, fracked, mined, developed...

The Kochs and other corporate interests will keep creating Astroturf pressure groups as long as those are effective. I think if they were to generate enough negative publicity, being exposed for what they are often enough, the effectiveness of these groups would rapidly diminish. That's a job for the media. But given who owns the media, the phoniness of these groups doesn't get much publicizing. Certainly not the way it would have a few decades ago.

SW: This shows how far the news "media" have deteriorated. The first time I ever heard of a fake "grassroots" group was in the early '80s. The same TV newscast that told about this group also called them exactly what they were: a corporate front group pretending to be a consumer advocacy organization. Those were the days...